Category — Department news

Are you an incoming or nontraditional LGBTQI student?

Would you like to:

• Get connected to the LGBTQI Community at SJSU?
• Get confidential support?
• Get linked to resources available to you?
• Make new friends?

Peers in PRIDE is a free mentorship program designed for incoming LGBTQI students.  We provide individual support and resources to undergraduates, graduate, and nontraditional students.  For questions or to request more information, contact Angela at peersinprideSJSU@gmail.com
Or drop by the LGBT Resource Center in Building BB anytime!

Here is a flier with this info about the program
And here is a Mentor Request form if you’d like to sign up!

I also offer my thanks to all our students, who are unfortunately shouldering an annual fee increase of over $900 in order to help San José State weather this budget storm. This rapid increase in student fees has resulted in a fundamental change in the balance of how education is funded across the CSU. For the first time in history, funding received from student fees — and other such  revenue sources — exceeds funding received from the State of California. This is unprecedented.

Here is a slide that shows the dramatic shift that has occurred over the past few years.

This increase in fees is a shameful shifting of responsibility for paying for public higher education from the state’s historic responsibility to San José State’s parents and students. This is not right. This is not what any of us wants. This act clearly breaks the promise of California’s higher education master plan. This promise created a system of higher education for the public good that now more and more is shifting to a personal/private responsibility. The master plan is so far out of whack that it is broken. This saddens me beyond belief, and I suspect it saddens all of you as well.

Our historic pride in access to all qualified citizens is now threatened. Our historic pride in serving a diverse population is now threatened. And our historic pride in continuous growth to serve the needs of a growing California is now threatened. So how will San José State deal with these threats going forward? That’s the question. How do we make the best of these challenging circumstances?

See full video and transcript here

By Matt Krupnick, Contra Costa Times
Updated: 08/13/2009 11:03:21 PM PDT

California State University students have asked a San Francisco judge to reverse fee hikes implemented last month after students had paid for the upcoming fall term.

The suit, filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court, closely resembles a successful action against the University of California that resulted in UC paying back about $42 million to former students. The same law firms that represented UC students are involved in the Cal State case.

“I believe it’s exactly the same thing that happened” at UC, said Danielle Leonard, an attorney with the students’ San Francisco firm, Altshuler Berzon. “This option should not have even been on the table.”

The class-action suit accuses the 440,000-student state university system of unfairly raising undergraduate and graduate fees in July, the second time in three months fees were hiked. Students at some campuses had as little as a week to pay the additional money to avoid having their accounts frozen, Leonard said. [Read more →]

As several hundred students shouted “Vote no!” outside the chamber door, California State University trustees Tuesday approved a student fee hike of 20% and agreed to furlough most faculty and staff, including college presidents, for two days each month.

The fee increase, a response to what board Chairman Jeffrey Bleich described as a fiscal “tsunami” powered by the state’s dire budget cuts, will bring average annual statewide charges for Cal State undergraduates to $4,026 a year, not including room, board, books and separate fees charged by each campus.

[Read more →]

On behalf of the Social Science Department and Women’s Studies Program, we would like to conratulate all the Social Science graduates on their tremendous accomplishment! The Social Science Department post-commencement reception will be held Saturday May 23, 2009 from 12:00-2:00 p.m. at the NW Quadrant of the Tower Lawn (adjacent to the MLK Library). Congratulations again!!!

From the Spartan Daily:

A living trust of $1 million was made to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resource Center from two SJSU alumni, the first major gift to SJSU’s Division of Student Affairs under which the LGBT resource center operates.

“It’s a great investment to the future of the LGBT center, friends and allies of the university,” said Bonnie Sugiyama, the assistant director of the university’s LGBT Resource Center. “It is money we will use in the future.”

The gift from philanthropists Larry Arzie and David Stonesifer, both Los Gatos residents and businessmen, is a living trust, which means their estate will transfer $1 million to the center after they pass, Sugiyama said.
The center is currently located in Building BB in room 101, next to the Aquatic Center. [Read more →]

Please pass along the following info to any graduating students that might be interested. Thanks for your help!

SJSU Pilipino Commencement 2009
http://sjsupilgrad.wordpress.com/
When: Thursday May 28, 2009
Where: Jacinto “Tony” Siquig Northside Community Center, 488 N.6th St. San Jose, Ca 95112

Registration Fee: $55 [Read more →]

The SJSU Master’s Program in Mexican American Studies is accepting applications for Fall 2009 admission.  Department chair Marc Pizarro said, “We are committed to training the next generation of Chicana/o Studies scholars and activists to take on the vast array of issues facing academia and our communities today.”

Prof. Pizarro also mentioned exciting work being done throughout the department:

• “Many of our students are doing very exciting work in applied Chicana/o Studies,  including:
  • Developing strategies for helping deaf education programs to better understand and address the needs of deaf students who come from non-English speaking families,
  • Creating programs for Latina teens to help them understand the factors leading to teen pregnancy and how to make informed decisions about sexual behavior,
  • Building an organization to analyze and confront the obstacles keeping Latino males from attaining educational success in the university,
  • Exposing the ways in which raza communities engage in environmental justice work and how they help us envision more holistic eco-justice strategies to benefit communities.
• We are continuing to develop our Curriculum, and have recently added new courses that emphasize Policy Analysis and Comparative Ethnic Studies respectively.  As new faculty join us, we hope to continue to increase our graduate offerings. [Read more →]